Know Your Mushrooms

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All Rise...

Eating one side of Judge Adam Arseneau will make you larger, the other makes you small.

The Charge

Far out, man.

Opening Statement

So…an entire documentary about mushrooms, you say? Sure, why not? You
can make a documentary about anything these days.

Facts of the Case

From director Ron Mann (Comic
Book Confidential) comes Know Your Mushrooms, an investigation into
all things mushroom in our culture. Follow mycology enthusiasts Gary Lincoff and
Larry Evans as they lead audiences on a hunt for the wild mushrooms and the
deeper cultural experiences attached to the mushroom. From the annual Telluride
Mushroom Festival to the psychedelic connotations of magic mushrooms, Know
Your Mushrooms opens the doors to perception and takes the audience on a
long, strange trip.

The Evidence

Depending on how you approach the word "mushroom," your perceptions
may vary wildly in our society. If you like to cook, mushrooms are a tasty
addition to any meal. If you are a psychedelic seeker, mushrooms mean a
particularly crazy trip. If you are a biologist, mushrooms are a fascinating
organism with deep ties into our planetary lifecycle of decomposition. Such is
the way of Know Your Mushrooms, an all-encompassing examination into all
things mushrooms, from edible to intellectual to interplanetary.

A short and scatterbrained film, Know Your Mushrooms has genuine
passion and fervor for its subject matter, but never really finds a solid
narrative footing for audiences to appreciate it. There are so many things to
talk about mushrooms, so many perspectives and cultural significances, so many
weird, wonderful slow-motion stop footage clips of mushrooms slowly growing,
that the film races from topic to topic like a hyperactive child. Audiences may
learn a little bit about this, a little bit about that, and, as a Mushroom 101
course, the documentary is interesting from a purely academic sense, if you can
keep up with the swaying.

We follow mycological enthusiasts from exploring the woods of Colorado
looking for edible mushrooms to lecture halls discussing the merits of
mushrooms, all the while interjected with esoteric stock footage, bizarre
commercials, and hallucinogenic animation sequences that serve no purpose but to
alarm audiences tremendously. Just as we learn something interesting about
mushrooms, like how scientists use them to sop up oil spills in the ocean, or
how they lower the blood pressure of mice in laboratory tests, like a bad trip,
the film swings wildly to another subject—commercial mushroom harvesting
to weird stock footage to cooking mushrooms to a chemical composition of
poisonous mushrooms to a 5-minute monologue by a crazy guy going on about his
magic mushroom trip—and more of those creepy animation sequences of
dancing mushrooms. The overall effect is…well, kind of unsettling. Dare I
say it? Kind of trippy.

Could mushrooms be too large and complex a subject for a mere 70-minute
documentary to tackle? It certainly seems so. A lot of these points are actually
quite fascinating, like the Western culture mentality eschewing the harvesting
of wild mushrooms due to danger when in actuality, surprisingly few mushrooms
are dangerous, or the spiritual and psychedelic cultural connections to
mushrooms shared by numerous societies and cultures throughout human history.
Alas, we get only tantalizing minutes on each subject before we go whooshing off
into the starts, literally. If the film could sit still long enough to
concentrate on one particular angle, it would be much more enjoyable.

From a technical perspective, this is an average low-budget documentary. The
widescreen anamorphic presentation gets the job done, varying in quality
depending on the footage shown, but exhibits a flat color palate, weak black
levels, and blocky compression artifacts. The 5.1 Surround transfer is more
impressive, with surprising bass response, clear dialogue, and satisfying
whooshing sound effects swinging from rear speakers. The score is a psychedelic
blend of Sixties rock and music by The Sadies and The Flaming Lips.

Extras are okay. We get a video short introduction by Larry Evans, uncut
footage from Gary Lincoff's lecture from the Telluride Mushroom Festival, some
deleted scenes, a theatrical trailer, and a trivia game. The best feature is an
interactive listing of mycological groups in North America for the curious to
seek out and explore the world of mushrooms.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

As documentaries go, Know Your Mushrooms is kind of a raging mess,
leaping from subject to subject with no narrative flow and too much psychedelic
pomp. Still, in a sense, it does get audiences somewhat curious about the world
of mushrooms. You go into the film wondering how the hell someone is going to
make an hour-plus documentary about something as innocuous as mushrooms, and
leave it musing about how the filmmakers needed a film three times as long to
actually explore the subject. I'd count that as a partial success in my
book.

Closing Statement

At a cursory glance, Know Your Mushrooms is interesting and esoteric
enough to warrant a curious glance, but the transparency of the documentary
reveals itself too quickly. Mushrooms are unexpectedly interesting as a subject
matter, but not interesting enough for audiences to sit through an hour-long
documentary this scatterbrained and unfocused. Too much of this film comes off
like a Troma version of Alice in
Wonderland. Know Your Mushrooms needs more focus and substance to do
its subject justice.